On Wed, Apr 23, 2025 at 01:45:59PM +1000, Ralph Ronnquist via Dng wrote:
> What do you mean with "best"? And why do you ask?

I was wondering if I could some how use Excalibur's netinst to install
Ceres, or if there is a Ceres netinst I'm not aware of. My question
was open ended, since I didn't want to restrict the possible ideas I
might get back. As for why I ask ... because I'm not omniscient.

>
> For example, the minbase chroot can be expanded with e.g.
> linux-image-amd64, busybox-static, virtiofsd and ifupdown, so as to
> have a virtual machine ready filesystem. Then you may add 9p, 9pnet
> and 9pnet_virtio to its /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, a short script
> in its /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/init-premount/, followed by an
> extra update-initramfs run within the chroot and "passwd" to set a
> root password.
>
> With that you may start a qemu virtual machine using the chroot
> filesystm as its root filesystem, and boot with that kernel and
> initrd. It's a fun way to spin up a virtual machine where its root
> filesystem is a directory tree of the host, and I think the method
> could well be in the race for being the "best" :)

Since I mostly use VirtualBox, and rarely use qemu, this is something
which didn't occur to me, and is one possible answer to my open ended
question I didn't think of.

>
> But dist-upgrading an excalibur is certainly good too.
>

Thanks to Joel and yourself for confirming that would also work.


On Wed, Apr 23, 2025 at 01:26:10PM -0400, fsmithred via Dng wrote:
> If you can stand to use refractainstaller, boot the devuan-live-speech iso
> in a VM with the virtual hard disk attached and just install that. It will
> copy the running live system to the hard disk along with any changes you
> made in that session.

Another possibility I didn't think of, thank you.


On Wed, Apr 23, 2025 at 01:39:49PM -0400, fsmithred via Dng wrote:
> Greg,
>
> I forgot to mention that the screen reader is partially broken in excalibur.
> It's not reading the desktop menus, but it will read what's inside a
> terminal on the desktop. And if you su to root, it will also speak your
> password as you type it.
>
> I haven't tried it in ceres, so I don't know if any of that has been fixed.

Thanks for that info. Another argument for installing Excalibur from
netinst, upgrading to Ceres, and exploring both along the way. I can
also check out the Excalibur installer along the way as it now stands.

Thanks to everyone who provided suggestions so far.

Greg


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